Civility and Confidence: A Resolution for 2026

“The inference to which we are brought, is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed; and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”

James Madison, Federalist 10

We might all agree that 2025 was a difficult year. A highlight reel of tragedies might include:

• a deadly mid-air collision over the Potomac River

• devastating fires in California and flash floods in Texas

• costly wars in Europe, Africa, Myanmar, and the Middle East

• hate-based violence in New Orleans, Utah, Minneapolis, and Sydney, Australia

Those and other natural and man-made traumas could leave us pessimistic about our future. But many people in the United States and abroad demonstrated tremendous resilience and humaneness in the response to loss and hardship. Acts of courage and compassion in response to tragedy should give us confidence in our ability to work together to promote peace and harmony.

In 2026, as Americans commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the founding of our Republic we might resolve to do our part to strengthen our nation. Civil discourse about opportunities to build a stronger nation for the next 250 years holds potential for arresting the growing vitriol in politics and strengthening our confidence in our common identities as Americans. The following is from the last few paragraphs of Battlegrounds written six years ago, pp. 443-445:

Partisan vitriol among America’s political leadership gives friends and foes alike the impression that the United States is incapable of competing effectively based on a bipartisan foreign policy. As the late professor and philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.” If we lack national pride, how can we possess the confidence necessary to fight effectively in war or implement a competitive foreign policy? In the United States, civics education might try to reverse the shift toward micro-identities and the focus on victimhood to foster what political scientist Francis Fukuyama describes as “broader and more integrative identities.”¹ Every time Americans talk or tweet about issues that divide them, they might devote at least equal time to what unites them—especially our commitment to the fundamental individual liberties contained in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights. The academy’s role in restoring our confidence and national pride may include a review of history, literature, and philosophy curricula to ensure that they contain not only self-criticism and a broad range of cultural perspectives, but also an acknowledgment of the nobility and accomplishments of our great unfinished American experiment in democracy and liberty. There is important work to do in primary and secondary education to rekindle in our youth an understanding of our history, including not only the contradictions and imperfections in our experiment, but also the virtues and great promise of America. Our teachers should not overlook blights on our history—the profound failures in the forcible subjugation of Native Americans, in slavery, in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, in institutionalized racism, in inequality for women, or in the mistreatment of other minorities—but they might place those stories in context. They might offer a progressive narrative that illuminates the advantages and resiliency of an American Constitution that placed sovereignty in the hands of the people and extended equal rights to previously excluded communities consistent with the nation’s founding principles.² Besides education, public service is another means of strengthening strategic confidence and national pride. Working to eliminate opportunity inequality through educational and economic reforms is integral to the fight to defend the free world, as confidence in our democracies and free-market economies is essential to maintaining our will to compete.³

Immigrants have been and remain one of America’s greatest competitive advantages. Oppressed peoples who come to the United States, a self-selecting group, have the intrepidity to start a new life and are appreciative of the freedom and opportunity in America. A way to help overcome fractures in our society would be to talk less about who we do not want to come to America and more about whom America needs. Those who believe in our Constitution, the rule of law, and the opportunity to work hard to create a better life should be welcomed and assimilated into our liberal-democratic culture.

An effort to restore confidence must extend to other free and open societies. Gains made in representative government and economic reform in the Western Hemisphere should not be taken for granted. And because Europe is particularly important to U.S. security, supporting its effort to overcome its struggle with identity politics and with Russia’s attempt to sow dissention within and among European nations should remain a top priority for U.S. diplomats.

I wrote this book on the eleventh floor of the Hoover Tower at the center of the Stanford University campus. Herbert Hoover founded the institution that bears his name a century ago after witnessing the horrors of the Great War. Hoover, an orphan who graduated from Stanford University’s inaugural class and who would later become America’s thirty-first president, led a massive relief effort at the end of World War I in Belgium that was credited with saving more than ten million people from starvation.⁴ It was there that he bore witness to the horrors of war and resolved to do all he could to help prevent another one. The experience of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of more than sixteen million people, highlighted the need to understand the political and historical basis for violent conflict as critical to preserving peace and ending wars. Hoover founded the Hoover Wall Collection, later named the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, as a place where scholars might study past wars to prevent future conflicts. As we know, however, the “war that was to end all wars” was instead the first of two world wars that marked the bloodiest century in modern world history. The tower that contains the vast Hoover Library and Archives, a collection meant to provide scholars with materials that might help explain the origins of wars and uncover prospects for peace, was completed in 1941, the year the United States entered World War II. It is in the spirit of that archive that I wrote this book, in an effort to use the study of the past to illuminate the present as the best way of influencing the future.

As historian Zachary Shore observed, “the greatest source of national strength is an educated populace.”⁵ It is my hope that this book will make a small contribution to the strength of our nation and other nations of the free world. Writing it was a continuation of my own education. I will judge it to have been worthwhile if it inspires vibrant, thoughtful, and respectful discussion of how we can best defend the free world and preserve a future of peace and opportunity for generations to come.

America’s founders were concerned about the problem of “faction.” But they knew that suppressing divisions would mean suppressing liberty. Instead, they designed a republican form of government that would make it difficult for any single faction or party to form a durable majority. Competing parties would have to compromise as structural safeguards such as separation of powers and a federal system of governance prevented the consolidation of power. The founders also knew that effective governance required civic norms that encouraged spirited, but respectful debate. In 2026, we might encourage politicians to remember the founders’ wise council. But we need not wait for the politicians. There is much that we can do in our communities to restore confidence in our ability to work together and strengthen our Republic. The founders understood that our nation’s continued “good health” required the active, informed, and virtuous involvement of the people.

Thank you for reading History We Don’t Know. I wish all of our readers the best for the Holidays and the New Year.

H.R. McMaster

Stanford, California

1. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 165–66.

2. Fukuyama, Identity, 170-171.

3. For the connection between income inequality and opportunity inequality and the importance of education, see Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), esp. 227–61.

4. Paul Reynolds, “History’s Other Great Relief Effort,” BBC, January 11, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4164321.stm

5. Zachary Shore, “The Spirit of Sputnik: Will America Ever Fund Education Again?” Medium, September 3, 2018, https://medium.com/@zshore/the-spirit-of-sputnik-881b8f720736